Apple's iCloud Mail & Notes services hit by sudden outage [u]

Two iCloud services, Mail and Notes, suffered server-side problems on Friday morning, leaving some people unable to send or receive email, or create and sync any notes online. [Updated]

Issues began around 8 a.m. Eastern time and are still ongoing, Apple's system status tracker indicates. The company claims that only 0.86 percent of iCloud users are affected.

Apple hasn't said whether the problem is global or localized, or when it might be resolved. Other online services could also potentially be affected, since Apple's tracker will sometimes miss the full extent of difficulties, or even ignore them completely.

People should still be able to use local versions of the Notes app such as the one in iOS 9, but affected users may not be able to get them to sync, or create new ones through iCloud.com.

iCloud has been hit by semi-regular outages since it first launched in 2011. Apple is believed to be working on overhauling and internalizing the network's architecture, but teams at the company are thought to be mired in conflict.

Updated: Apple states that the problem was resolved shortly after noon Eastern time.

Given the frequency of outages, I'm wondering if Apple Insider would consider dedicating a portion of its website to providing a live feed of Apple's network reporting data. It would save me time in looking up and having to check if an issue occurred, and it would provide a draw for more folks to bookmark this site as a reference.

Given the frequency of outages, I'm wondering if Apple Insider would consider dedicating a portion of its website to providing a live feed of Apple's network reporting data. It would save me time in looking up and having to check if an issue occurred, and it would provide a draw for more folks to bookmark this site as a reference.

If Apple seriously wants to increase its Services revenue, it could do with getting the basics - like Email - right!!

It is really more about data centers. Apple only has a few. Think of it like a disk array. If one fails there is redundancy. The way data centers for large organizations like Google, Microsoft, Facebook work is they have multiple data centers in diverse geographic areas which continually copy data to backup centers so if there is a backbone outage the data centers are load balanced and the traffic gets routed to the back up center. Apple is building out their data center presence but they are not there yet. I think Google has 12 substantial data centers in the US and 5 more in Europe...and they have several under construction. So it is not really how big the data centers are, you need lots of them to provide redundancy.

It's entertaining to read people complain about iCloud service reliability...

Being someone that is forced to work with Microsoft cloud products daily, I can attest to how many MORE problems Microsoft's services have vs Apple's, yet not ONE SINGLE NEWS AGENCY usually picks up on the almost DAILY failures of Microsoft's junk...

In 5 years, I have had some of the best uptime and reliability with iCloud when compared against Microsoft services, such as OneDrive, Azure, Exchange 365, etc... The only company that has shown better reliability and uptime has been Dropbox.

Given the frequency of outages, I'm wondering if Apple Insider would consider dedicating a portion of its website to providing a live feed of Apple's network reporting data. It would save me time in looking up and having to check if an issue occurred, and it would provide a draw for more folks to bookmark this site as a reference.

Unfortunately Apple frequently misses mentioning down services, or reports them long after they've been evident to some users based on numerous mentions of unreported service outages on various Apple fan sites. Linking to their status report may not be as beneficial as you'd assume it would be

Given the frequency of outages, I'm wondering if Apple Insider would consider dedicating a portion of its website to providing a live feed of Apple's network reporting data. It would save me time in looking up and having to check if an issue occurred, and it would provide a draw for more folks to bookmark this site as a reference.

Thanks I am well aware of the link, but as a service to its readers it would be helpful if Apple Insider included this information (just like they show the current stock price). I usually have this site tabbed and open during the day and it would be helpful.

Given the frequency of outages, I'm wondering if Apple Insider would consider dedicating a portion of its website to providing a live feed of Apple's network reporting data. It would save me time in looking up and having to check if an issue occurred, and it would provide a draw for more folks to bookmark this site as a reference.

Thanks I am well aware of the link, but as a service to its readers it would be helpful if Apple Insider included this information (just like they show the current stock price). I usually have this site tabbed and open during the day and it would be helpful.

I am in the Midwest and seem to get an outage or two each month. Given the sheer scale it seems reasonable but I am expecting no drop in service. I suspect that we will continue to see blips as Apple continues to grow user base and infrastructure.